Column - Greg Sagan: How do you face down a video image?

Even a casual reading of just this paper shows some deep fault lines in the edifice of official and unofficial attitudes about these cameras, and the time appears to be drawing near when we will devote the kind of thought to this topic that it deserved before we adopted this technology.

The issues surrounding red-light cameras seem to fall into these categories: safety, municipal revenue and justice. When we consider these issues it is useful to disregard the arguments used to sell remote control traffic monitoring. I'm all for salesmanship, but no salesman worth a damn tells you the whole story, and it doesn't matter if he's a representative of a bank, a used-car dealership, an aluminum siding manufacturer or a political institution.

So let's forget the hype and smoke.

Does a red-light camera make us safer? So far the data seem to suggest that they don't make what scientists call "a significant difference." Now when a scientist uses the term "significant difference" he doesn't mean socially significant, legally significant, economically significant, or aesthetically significant, he means statistically significant. Without boring you with a treatise on statistics, suffice to say that the difference in the number of collisions at intersections with and without red light cameras appears to be within the boundaries of random fluctuation. That is, chance.

Amarillo has only a handful of these cameras, and if safety were our goal, then we would have them at every intersection in town. As it is, how much extra effort is involved in simply avoiding the intersections with the cameras?

But there is a deeper issue and a larger question around safety: How far should the government go to make us safe? It's one thing to have an army and navy that can keep the likes of Adolf Hitler at bay. It's another thing entirely for the government to say that we can't smoke tobacco, drink alcohol, eat sugar and fats, sniff glue or run a malfunctioning red light on an empty road because the consequences might be bad for us. Should the government put a camera at an intersection to keep me safe? I say no, even if the camera really would keep me safe. I prefer to take the matter of safety on the road as a matter of personal responsibility. Speed limits are regularly busted, both high and low, by people every day. It does me no good to have the idiot in the next lane getting a speeding ticket in the mail a week from next Thursday.

So, on to the next issue: municipal revenue enhancement. Are we getting more money, enough money, from these cameras? Well, let's take a big step back for a moment. What do we call any attempt to enhance the money that any government collects? We can use all kinds of euphemisms - fees, fines, tolls, tariffs, dues and levies - but from an economic perspective they're all taxes.

One attraction of the red-light cameras was that "only the guilty would pay." This is a tolerable fiction if you don't think about it too much, kind of like "only the guilty need fear the law." But it's a fiction. See "justice" below.

Should we, as a matter of public policy, adopt any measure whose sole, or even overriding, purpose is to collect more money for the government? I should think most Americans would resist this on principle. I would even go so far as to say we have way too much of this already.

So what about justice? Do all the people, and only the people, who run red lights get a citation from the company operating the cameras? I don't know for sure, but the mere idea strains credulity. What does a camera see? A car, a red light and a license plate. What doesn't the camera see? The pregnant woman in the back seat. The surrounding traffic, if any. The contrast between a changing light and the setting or rising sun. The arrogant jerk screaming up from behind at warp factor five a hundred feet back on a wet street. The argument from the harridan in the passenger seat. The funeral procession.

I suppose some cameras pick up some of these extraneous conditions, maybe even most of the time. But who is the accuser? A cop, trained to observe and carrying a badge, who pulls us over as soon as we violate the law, or a technical functionary at a computer screen in another state who believes only, and all, of what the camera tells him?

It is a central tenet of American justice that we are able to confront an accuser who says we've violated the law.